Sylvia Plath | Criticism

This selection [Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams], made by Ted Hughes, of Sylvia Plath's miscellaneous prose—published stories, articles, a few passages from the notebook-journals—is probably the best that can at present be done to pad out the record….

[The] notes from Cambridge (1956) are the most remote, not just in time. They reek of closet-theatre, and are full of self-disliking yet somehow cosy parentheses—"as I have so often boasted cleverly", "see, how dangerous", "always patching masks". She sounds bored with the gothic contents of her consciousness; the motifs are all there (Lazarus, the cold moon, father/lovers, birth-damaged babies, stillborn poems) but devoid of passion or even interest, as though she had grown weary of rehearsing them. It was perhaps a defensive pose; however, it seems to have stuck, and obviously had to be unstuck—"My God, I would love to cook and make...